


The Slow Regaining of Vision

by classics_above_classics



Series: Alice Dorothy and Stories Set Elsewhere [11]
Category: Elsewhere University (Webcomic)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Gen, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 06:54:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19246081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/classics_above_classics/pseuds/classics_above_classics
Summary: It's alright to feel as if everything that's happened is dragging you down.(It's alright to get up anyway.)





	The Slow Regaining of Vision

**Author's Note:**

> i'm tired

_Thorns, wrapping around her neck tightly, not a shred of mercy at every misunderstanding. The sting of them pushing deeper and deeper into cuts. Alice D. gasps for breath, feeling the way the hand constricts, feeling the painful drag of air being torn from her throat. She can’t breathe. She feels bile rising, her throat lurching along with the rest of her. It hurts. It hurts. It_ hurts.

_She’s scared. More than anything, more than any feeling bubbling up within her, she’s scared. Her breath is catching in her lungs whenever she can take one and her heart is pounding and she wants to get out. This isn’t right. She looks up, forces her blurry vision to sharpen, and all she can see is green._

_“No,” she gets out, past the chokehold lifting her up, “put me down, let me go, let me_ go _, I need you to-”_

“- need you to wake up, okay? Could you do that for me? Mx. Dorothy, wake up-”

 _It isn’t a person before her anymore. It’s a threat. It’s every myth, every legend, every punishment the stories said she would get. She can’t reason with a punishment. She can’t beg. All she can do is choke, breathe, try to escape. Try to get it to stop caring. Try to get it to look away. She wants it to leave, needs it to leave, needs to be covered and protected and_ away _from it._

“-it’s fine, okay? It’s fine. You got out, you’re fine-”

_The punishment is angry. It does not look away._

“- Dorothy? Dorothy, look at me-”

_D. doesn’t cry, can’t feel herself cry; she can only feel the weight of it all. Everything is blurring. Nothing seems real. She can’t feel her glasses, can’t feel her heartbeat. Is she dead? She can’t be dead. But she can’t feel how alive she is past the nausea in her body. She wants to stay alive. She wants, desperately, to stay alive. She looks up, hears the angry calls of someone in the distance- did she forget a chore? Did she do something she shouldn’t have? She’s not in Elsewhere anymore, not anywhere she trusts, and for a second she’s done something wrong and it’s not Alice Dorothy being watched, it’s F-_

“Dorothy!”

The yelling, really, is what wakes her up most.

Alice D. lurches, light and the world and breath flooding back at her in an instant. Whatever’s surrounding her is both safe and constricting at once. She fumbles against it, against the cocoon of fabric that isn’t her thin blanket from home, and in an instant someone’s unzipping something, freeing her from its constraints. Michael. She fell asleep in Michael’s office.

“I’m sorry,” she says before anything. “Was I screaming? Did I wake you up?”

“What? No. No, I was awake before.” Michael lays his hands on her shoulders, his weight something grounding keeping her in check. “You were shaking. And…”

Dorothy reaches up, feels the faint dampness of tears on her cheeks. She was crying? That’s a relief. She thought she’d forgotten how to do it. She hasn’t cried in years.

“Do you need anything?” Michael asks, helping her out of the sleeping bag. She liked it, back when she’d first fallen asleep in it. It had been comfortable. Warm. It’s only natural that it’d feel wrong later on, then. “I have some snacks here, if you don’t feel like leaving yet. Breakfast foods, like eggs and rice and bread and bacon. Coffee, too. You can stay for a bit and rest.”

She’d love that. Staying. Not having to worry.

“I have classes at ten,” D. responds, shifting in her place on the floor. “Can I go back at around nine and get ready for them?”

“Yeah. Yeah, you can do that.” Michael sighs, looking much more relieved than he had been before. “So… coffee?”

“Do you have milk I can put in it?” D. asks, standing back up. The thought of black coffee is already enough to make her gag. “Or chocolate milk?”

“I have brown coffee.”

“Close enough. Thank- I mean- I appreciate it.”

The silence that follows isn’t uncomfortable. Awkward, maybe- there isn’t exactly much protocol for what happens after you wake someone up from a nightmare- but it’s not uncomfortable. Michael gets out a portable water heater and starts boiling some water. D. cleans up the pillows arranged on the floor and packs up her things. And the day begins.

⋈

D. goes back to her dorm that morning and Connor is still there.

That’s incredibly worrying, of course, since it’s a Thursday and Connor still most definitely has classes- classes which started, like most of their classes do, at eight-thirty. But it’s not like she can really say anything against her roommate when they’re so frantic. Connor greets her that morning by grabbing her when she walks in, all concerned and panicked at her disappearance that night.

“Where have you been?! You just grabbed all your stuff and left! I thought you were off to go die by Lyric-Weaver’s hand or something, with the look on your face-”

“Didn’t I tell you I was going to Michael’s office?”

“Yeah, you did. Like I believed it. You looked like you were going to walk off a building, _fuck_. I’m surprised I didn’t just follow your dumb ass right then and there.” Connor inhales sharply, calm forced back into their expression slowly, waveringly. “There were plants growing out of your _neck_. Did you know that, at least?”

“No.” Michael had said there were thorns. Good on him, really; in the state of mind she was in last night, she would have asked to see him pull them out. And then the horror would only hit her in the morning. At least she’s feeling a little better about everything now. “Michael took them out, I think. He wouldn’t let me look.”

“Fucking _good_. I think I’d cry just looking at someone rip plants out of my wounds. God knows what you’d do. Probably puke all over Michael’s nice boots.”

“They are nice,” D. remarks unthinkingly. They’re clean, really. They aren’t falling apart. A far cry from her own shoes; she’s never really been able to make herself buy new ones. She always ends up wanting the ones she’d be mocked for wearing. Like the cute white shoes with straps she sees on so many Lolita costumes. “I like to think I’d swallow all the puke before I vomited on him.”

“You rolled a four on your base constitution. Don’t bet on that.” Connor makes a face. “Fuck. I thought you were going to _die_ , D. I thought you were going to try to kill them. Lyric-Weaver, I mean. I thought you were going to try and get revenge or something. I know I would.”

“Revenge is something I’ve never really wanted.” She doesn’t see the point of it. Violence begets violence. There’s no need to anger anyone more. It isn’t even all that satisfying, really. “Revenge feels too empty for me to want it. If anything, I’d have gone and found some protective tokens or something.”

“And… did you do that?”

“… Shit.” Fuck. She’d been in Michael’s office the whole night last night. Why didn’t she ask? She should have had the presence of mind to ask. “I’ll ask later. Study hall, maybe? Lunchtime?”

“You’re going to _wait_?!” Connor’s looking more and more disbelieving by the minute. “No. Are you still planning to go to class today or something? Cut the shit, D. - there’s no way you’ll be able to focus. You need some rest. You could have _died_ yesterday, Christ’s sake. The teachers know about Elsewhere’s whole magic thing, don’t they? Just e-mail them and tell them the truth. You need a rest day.”

“But I want to go to class.” Really, she does. D. wants to take the time to calm down, to refocus, to ground herself and learn. She wants something other than the quiet and the sterility of the dorm. She wants the lightness and sound of people. “Class _is_ rest to me, Connor. Nothing stressful is scheduled for today, and I need to work my brain to stop it from dwelling on the trauma. I need to return to something routine that I can trust.”

Connor levels her with a disapproving glare. It doesn’t quite work; Alice D.’s faced glares much more disconcerting than her reckless roommate’s.

“It’s alright, Connor. Today isn’t going to be stressful. It’s a way to bring myself out of the despair spiral I would have gone into otherwise. Trust me.” She’s dealt with spirals like this before, with times she just wanted to curl up and drown. Drowning is always the worse option. “I’m probably not going to be at my best today, but something more lively will help me get there. Do you understand that?”

“… Fine. But you leave if things are too much, understand?” The robotics major stomps her foot on the ground, glaring up at D. resolutely. “Don’t go too far.”

“I won’t.”

And with that agreement reached, Alice D. begins to get ready for the day.

⋈

She doesn’t see Lyric-Weaver for the rest of the day. It’s almost worrying, how comforting that is.

She doesn’t see Lento, either. And somehow, through the twisting sickness in her heart, that’s almost worse.

Lyric-Weaver’s favoured table that lunch time is empty. So is the shelf in the library full of musical history books they frequent. D. can see how Connor glances worriedly at each blank spot, as if Lyric-Weaver’s disappearance is characterized by only this haunting lack of presence. She knows how worried it’s making them. So she tries not to look at those empty spaces, tries not to show just how much they make the weight in her heart and lungs light. It wouldn’t be fair to Connor to show it. It wouldn’t be right.

Where are they? Where is Lyric-Weaver, in every bright, creeping shade of green they are? D. hopes to God that they’re not hurting anyone. She knows all too well that her hopes aren’t likely to come to fruition. She doesn’t even really believe it will work when she prays for Lento’s safety. She doesn’t really believe it will work when she prays Lyric-Weaver will have mercy. And yet, and yet, she prays.

She doesn’t know what to pray for. She doesn’t know what to hope for. But she hopes for Lento’s safety, for Lento’s happiness, for Lento to come back someday unburdened and unhurt. She hopes that Lyric-Weaver does not find her, and that they let this vengeance go. She hopes that Lento finds a way to apologize, to heal the pain and the fear she has caused. She hopes that Lyric-Weaver accepts it.

And in the deepest, most closely guarded spaces of her mind, she hopes that she comes out of this alive and well.

People are looking at her in the hall, at the absence of the changeling at their usual table. They whisper. They worry. D. prays too that they don’t hate her for what she hasn’t done. She doesn’t want more of this. Already she’s Debt-Breaker, the one who tore out everything she’s owed. She doesn’t want to be that. She never wants to be that. She doesn’t want to be a threat, she doesn’t want to be a danger, she doesn’t want to be watched and suspected and hated. She wants to get through the year reasonably safe, reasonably happy. She doesn’t want a fairy tale. She just wants a life.

She doesn’t want the chance of that taken from her because of the suspicions starting to come to light.

But she tries to get through anyway, tries to focus on classes and on her work and on what else she could do. Spiralling into fear and grief isn’t going to help anyone. Letting herself stagnate isn’t going to help anyone. It’s not even going to help her. All she can do is move forward, look to the future, and hope everything will go well.


End file.
